The Manifesto

Men were once identified by how well they fought the good fight – by their self-discipline, their hard work, their pursuit of virtue. Nowadays the only semblance of identity these men find is in some loose affiliation with a product or a brand or a hobby – some arbitrary thing.

Their identity’s store-bought. It’s superficial. It’s useless.

They don’t even remember that there’s a good fight to be fought.

These men have no purpose because they have no roots. And they have no roots, not because those roots aren’t there. They are. They always have been. But they’ve been obscured by a culture that hates them.

Because those roots point not to the fads and fashions and vices, and the easy living of the modern age.

No.

They demand something from us.

They point to absolute truth.

They point to the absolute goodness made manifest in the collective experience of all those greater men who came before us. Men who not only suffered the same weaknesses we suffer, but who overcame them, and who remembered how, and who passed that on.

This collective experience was hard won over millennia. Centuries of trial and error and revelation. It was built on asceticism, discipline, sacrifice, warfare – all of which we’ve traded off. For comfort. For technology. For ideology.

We traded what we knew worked for what we thought sounded good.

And we’ve suffered for it.

But…

There is hope.

Chesterton wrote that the only real revolution is a restoration, and that’s what we’re starting to see. A generation of men who are gnashing their teeth and clenching their fists and tearing their muscle in pursuit of that restoration, doing their damnedest to claw back that inheritance that was stolen from them, to find that forbidden wisdom that runs so contrary to the spirit of the age that they weren’t even supposed to know it was there.

Men who’ve reached their limit.

Men who recognize that something is wrong and who therefore endeavor to dig up those Permanent Things our society has stupidly, arrogantly, willfully buried.

I’m J.D. Bentley, and it’s for these reasons I started Blood & Bourbon

Blood & Bourbon is a living handbook to help us rediscover masculine tradition. To help us study it, practice it, and put it to work.

On the site you’ll find articles and resources about spiritual warfare, physical warfare, and intellectual warfare, all things we need to remember who it is we were called to be.